With many brands and businesses spending six months and around half a million quid on a bit of content that everyone skips in three seconds, the folks in a Peruvian cevichería in Lima have delivered something twice as compelling and on a shoestring. Recreating Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show using their own staff, raw sea bass and a smartphone.
If you haven’t seen it, do have a watch, its pretty epic especially when you compare the shot by shot recreation of the live performance as a commercial kitchen bench is turned into a miniature stadium and the staff use what seems to be the entire lunch menu to create the perfect homage in a a frame-accurate diorama of the iconic performance watched by millions only a week or so ago.
Red onions become stage lights. Slices of sweet potato and corn make up the dressing, and a single, perfectly carved piece of fish sits centre stage as the star. Kitchen tongs and spatulas look like heavy-duty lighting, and it’s all filmed with a macro lens to give it proper cinematic music-video-level energy.
Perfectly beat-synced to reggaeton sounds, this isn’t the shonky remake that was once a staple of early-day YouTube. Oh no, this is a masterclass in homage that vacillates into pastiche and back again with the choreography on point. So brilliantly bizarre that millions are now aware that, should they ever find themselves in downtown Lima, they know where to get good cured fish.
And very much a sign of the times and how we have moved so far on from traditional ad models and TV production, where most of the money is spent on strategic pillars, thoughts about translating to the verticals and ensuring that you have every lens and angle under the sun covered for the shoot by a director who costs the earth and edits like his Thelma Schoonmaker
Oh no, this is the age in which production value is more about the audacity and the gap between an idea and an execution is now measured in minutes rather than weeks and months and where participation in culture is a form of ownership of said culture as creators and brands, but ever more inventively against the gilded cage of perfectionism.
So if ads are a lecture, messy videos like this one are a conversation, and if a further message is needed to the establishment, it is that if you are not willing to play with your food, you do not deserve to be at the table.
